A Short List of Questions
Before anyone can act against you, they have to answer a short list of questions. Where does this person live. What do they drive. Who else is in the house. When are they alone. In the intelligence trade, that list has a name. It is called a collection plan.
A collection plan is just the list of things someone has to know before they can do something. Yours is shorter than you think. And most of it is never gathered by watching you. It is looked up, or bought, from records you never filed.
Bought, Not Watched
Data brokers are companies that collect information about people and sell it. When the Federal Trade Commission studied nine of them, back in 2014, one held data on 1.4 billion consumer transactions. Another was adding 3 billion new records a month. A third kept more than 3,000 data segments on nearly every American. The scale is a decade old. The mechanism is not.
Where You Live
What You Drive
When You Are Alone
So rank your exposures by what they buy. A job title tells someone why you might matter. A home address tells them where to arrive. An approach is a physical act and it needs a place. The items that convert interest into arrival are the ones you work first.
What the Address Buys
In July 2020, a gunman posing as a delivery driver came to the New Jersey home of a federal judge, Esther Salas. He murdered her 20-year-old son and wounded her husband. He had found the family address online. New Jersey passed Daniel's Law four months later.
Daniel's Law is named for that son, Daniel Anderl. It makes it unlawful to publish the home address or unlisted home phone number of a covered official once that person asks for it to be taken down, and it extends the same protection to the immediate household family rather than to the official alone. Two things about it matter here. It exists because an address, published, was the thing that let a killer arrive. And it covers a narrow, defined class of people: judges, prosecutors, law enforcement. If you are not on that list, no statute takes your address down for you. That is the gap this course works in.
This is not only a problem for judges. In 2019, about 3.4 million Americans, 1.3 percent of residents 16 and older, were stalking victims. Among those stalked both with technology and by traditional means, 67 percent feared being killed or physically harmed.
Put it to work on one sheet of paper. Write the four questions down the left side: where you live, what you drive, who else is in the house, when you are alone. Beside each one, write where the answer is already published and what it would cost someone to look it up. The rows that already have an answer sitting in public are your work list, in order. This course will teach you how to make that list as short as possible. Next, you run the hour on yourself.